BearShare Won't Connect I am at Dorms

[ngibson12]

So I am at my college dorms and I have used bearshare on this computer before and I moved into the dorms and it wont work.

I talked to the dorm people and they said they used comcast, but they dont have a firewall. So any ideas about whats up?

I really like bearshare and I am sad haha help?

[ngibson12]

To be more specific about what I have I use a NetGear Router RP114 and it is not the router problem becasue I have used bearshare at my house. My firewall on my computer is basic Windows Firewall. So it has to do with something at the dorms right? Anyone know how i can get around a good firewall

[Lord of the Rings]

I've heard of many people staying at dorms having problems connecting to the gnutella network. It's often a school policy to not allow p2p sharing so they either block or shape the bandwidth that can be used. An example of a gnutella shaper at a school is here: Bandwidth Shaper Sample - typical of how some schools & ISP's use it (click on link) ie: giving priority to net surfing & low priorities to p2p sharing.

Perhaps a proxy might help. Unfortunately I don't know about BearShare's abilities to handle proxies. But tips can be found particularly on page 2 here A Fix for those whose ISP's block Limewire pages 1 - 3 which have links to alternative instructions. (Sorry the link "is" is the LimeWire section but same principle applies! )